| The Civil Rights Movement's Fight Against Private Discrimination
There's one really huge problem with Rand Paul's position here--and that's that private discrimination was a huge part of the problem facing blacks in the South--and not just in the South. A black man could get a PhD, and end up sweeping floors. That's because of private discrimination. In fact, even today, as I've noted before, a white man with a prison record is more likely to get a job offer in a controlled test than a black man with a clean record.
Historically, the the Freedom Rides were all about ending private discrimination in interstate travel--something that had already been accomplished in law (by the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Supreme Court, which, one can only presume, Rand Paul would also have opposed) , but not in practice. The lunch counter Sit-In Movement was equally focused on private discrimination. The two most prominent examples were Greensboro--credited with re-igniting the Civil Rights Movement in 1960, and Nashville, both of which were chock full of young people who actually did go on to march with Martin Luther King, as well as being civil rights leaders in their own right. The Birmingham Campaign was almost exclusively about private sector discrimination. Although it was enforced by local laws, those laws were strongly--even violently--supported by the white population on an individual and group level. And, of course, the 1963 March on Washington was officially known as the "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom" [emphasis added]. In short, the Civil Rights struggle against racial segregation and discrimination was a holistic one that repeatedly came up against private forms of discrimination by white business owners and managers, as well other white workers and customers.
The Civil Rights Act's Various Provisions Paul Wouldn't Like
On Rachel Maddow's show, Paul went even further in trying to belittle the significance of private discrimination and falsely expanding the impression of how much of it he would have supported, saying:
PAUL: Well, there's 10 -- there's 10 different-there's 10 different titles, you know, to the Civil Rights Act, and nine out of 10 deal with public institutions. And I'm absolutely in favor of one deals with private institutions, and had I been around, I would have tried to modify that. But you know, the other thing about legislation-and this is why it's a little hard to say exactly where you are sometimes, is that when you support nine out of 10 things in a good piece of legislation, do you vote for it or against it? And I think, sometimes, those are difficult situations.
"See," Rand Paul is saying, in effect, "That was only 1/10th of the whole bill! Just a teensy part!"
Bullshit!
Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!
First off, as I've just briefly described above, private discrimination was intimately interwoven into the fabric of discrimination and segregation throughout the South--and it was even more significant in the North, where legally mandated segregation and discrimination was almost non-existent, but discriminatory practices were not only widespread, but incredibly virulent and deep-seated, as King himself discovered in no uncertain terms as he tried to take his organizing north, most particularly to Chicago.
But that's only the beginning of Paul's bullshit here. There were actually at least six titles in the 1964 Civil Rights Act that Paul would have had problems with at the time, given his expressed ideology. And there are two more, dealing with voting rights, that he might well have problems with today, given the widespread hatred Tea Baggers have for ACORN, up to an including the wild-eyed notion that ACORN somehow "stole" the 2008 election. In short, Paul's problems with the Civil Rights Act are anything but marginal to its main thrust.
First of all, there were two titles in the Civil Rights Act dealing with private discrimination. Title II dealt with discriminatory service in hotels, motels, restaurants, theaters, and all other public accommodations engaged in interstate commerce, while Title VII dealt with employment discrimination As we'll see below, Barry Goldwater pegged his opposition to act on both these titles, and there's no reason to think that Paul would have felt any differently.
In contrast, three titles dealt with governmental discrimination (Title III, Title IV, Title VI), two dealt with voting rights (Title I and Title VIII), and one (Title X) established the Community Relations Service, tasked with assisting in community disputes involving claims of discrimination-both public and private. In short, private discrimination was not nearly so small a part of the Civil Rights Act as Rand Paul tries to make out. It involves three titles, not just one. What's more, there's another title that he might have had a little problem with, Title IX, which made it easier to shift jurisdiction over civil rights cases from state courts with segregationist judges and all-white juries to federal court. But wait! Of the titles dealing with public discrimination, Title III also "infringed on states' rights"! As Wikipedia describes, it "Prohibited state and municipal governments from denying access to public facilities on grounds of race, religion, gender, or ethnicity." Given Rand Paul's invocation of localism in justifying his opposition to the Americans With Disabilities Act--saying that those sorts of things are better dealt with locally-- is it really credible that he would have had no problem with Title III? And what about Title IV, dealing with local school desegregation? What happens to his localism with respect to that title--one that builds directly on Brown v. Board of Education? It's really hard to imagine Rand Paul proudly taking a stand against states rights, given how strongly he argues for them today. It's much more likely he "would have tried to modify that" when it comes to titles III, IV and X as well. So there are actually at least six titles of the Civil Rights Act that Paul would have had a problem with at the time, given his philosophy today. That's 60% of the titles in the act, not just 10%..
And then there's the two titles devoted to voting rights--titles that were frankly inadequate, and were effectively superseded by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 the following year. Frankly, it's not just Paul, but the entire GOP establishment that has always had a problem with black people voting, ever since committing to the Southern Strategy. Suppressing the minority vote has a long history with the GOP (Rehnquist was even involved in suppressing the Hispanic vote in Arizona back in the 1950s). Groups who try to mobilize that vote have been treated as enemies, and ACORN's leading role in such mobilizations over the past two decades is one of the main factors driving the GOP demonization of it. Thus, the only reason that Paul probably would not have opposed those two voting rights titles as well was simply because of a lack of foresight.
In short, there are only two out of ten titles to the Civil Rights Act that Paul clearly would have supported then, based on his current knowledge and stated beliefs. He could, perhaps, make a credible argument that we would have supported more of them, but he has not done so thus far. Instead, he has lied--or more probably just bullshitted--about what was in the act. And he doesn't seem all that interested in talking about the subject any further.
Goldwater & Other Opponents Used Rand Paul's Logic In Opposing the Civil Rights Act
There are two more things wrong with Rand Paul's imaginary history of himself as freedom marcher. The first is the actual history surrounding the passage of the act. As brought up by Siegal in the NPR interview, Barry Goldwater did vote against the Civil Rights Act, and unlike Paul he did have a demonstrable record of supporting civil rights. He had been a member of the NAACP. What stopped him was the same libertarian philosophy he broadly shares with Rand Paul. What follows are relevant passages from Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, pp. 363-365. First, on p 363. Perlstein describes seeking constitutional legal advice from William Rehnquist and Robert Bork, while also referencing Goldwater's own record opposing discrimination locally in Arizona:
We can usefully supplement this account with a brief bit of contemporary coverage from Time magazine ("Nation: One Man's Stand" [Friday, Jun. 26, 1964]). Here is the first paragraph:
Rarely has one man's vote been watched so closely as Barry Goldwater's on the civil rights bill. He had thought about it long and hard. "I really wanted to be able to vote for the bill," he told a newsman. "This week I've asked every lawyer friend I know to show me some constitutional justification for it. The answer is always: 'All you can say is that you feel a majority of the people are for it, and so you're going to vote for it on that basis.' But that's not enough. I just can't go along with just that."
It's telling that Goldwater "asked every lawyer friend I know", and could find no one who thought that the Civil Rights Act was constitutional--despite the fact, as I pointed out last weekend--that Anglo-American common law had for centuries upheld the principle of non-discrimination. Furthermore, the Supreme Court itself had upheld non-discrimination in businesses related to interstate commerce--gaining de facto enforcement of that ruling had been the rationale of the Freedom Riders, and Title II was pirmarily codification into federal law of what the Supreme Court had already ruled. So that fact that Goldwater knew no lawyers who were aware of any of this as "some constitutional justification" [emphasis added]--whether or not they found it persuasive-- surely says something about the libertarian bubble in which Goldwater lived--much like the libertarian bubble apparently surrounding Rand Paul throughout his life... or at least up until this week.
A second point is equally important: finding that no lawyer he knew could provide constitutional justification, Goldwater chose not to seek out anyone else who might enlighten him as the majority view of civil rights and Constitutional law at the time. Such willful ignorance hardly comports with the libertarian's cherished stance of intellectual fearlessness and open-mindedness. But it does comport quite well with the reality of libertarian narrow-mindedness, ahistoricism, and over-all cluelessness about the world outside their own social bubble.
Perlstein's account continues:
So, discrimination was a "God-given right" notwithstanding centuries of common law to contrary, and the the right not to be discriminated against--enshrined in common law--was a "special appeal for special welfare" that could only be enforced through a massive police state... something that Goldwater found unimaginable, despite the obvious existence of just such a police state throughout the South at the time, the over brutality of which had proven crucial in generating the overwhelming support that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 then enjoyed.. Projection much? Is there anything else to Goldwater's position aside from projection? Other than historical ignorance and a 13-year-old's idea of freedom, that is. And is there anything more to it today, when espoused by Rand Paul?
The account in Time tracks quite closely with Perlstein's account, but also includes this:
The legislation that reached the Senate after passage in the House, he said, was produced by "sledgehammer political tactics." He had hoped that it would be modified by "what was once considered to be the greatest deliberative body on earth." But it was apparent "that emotion and political pressure, not persuasion, not common sense, not deliberation, had become the rule of the day and of the processes of this great body." The Senate, he charged, had ignored the Constitution and "the fundamental concepts of our governmental system. My basic objection to this measure is, therefore, constitutional."
And thus Goldwater had gone all the way down the slippery slope and into the rabbit hole. It was no longer just the lawyers he knew who saw no Constitutional argument for the bill. There was no Constitutional argument for it, and the Supreme Court be damned! Here are the seeds of the Conservative judicial jihad that has come to dominate our nation's courts in the 46 years since then, a jihad that folks like Barack Obama cluelessly accept as normal.
Perlstein goes on to elaborate a bit on the realworld reality that Goldwater so blissfully ignored:
In The Racial Order of Things: Cultural Imaginaries of the Post-Soul Era.Roopali Mukherjee follows a quote of Goldwater's Senate speech with the following indication of rhetorical and ideological continuity (p 226):
The continuity here between Goldwater's argument and Wallace's is unmistakable. Wallace, too, is arguing in terms of white "freedom", just as Paul would argue today.
The Role of Private Discrimination In Continuing To Resist Civil Rights
Paul's argument is further weakened by the fact that private discrimination was not only an integral part of the system of discrimination and segregation before the Civil Rights Act, but was also an integral part of resistance to civil rights from Brown v. Board of Education onwards, including well after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The book The Moderates' Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia tells the story of how Virginia finally gave up its initial response of "massive resistance" to de-segregation of the public school system. A passage in a 2001 Washington Post article by Donald Baker, "Shame of a Nation: The Lessons and Legacy of the Prince Edward School Closings", provides a concise overview of the struggle:
Brown was only the beginning of the struggle for desegregation. In defiance of the court's decision, Virginia enacted a series of laws that came to be known as Massive Resistance. Embracing the states' rights principles of the Confederacy, the General Assembly essentially declared the Supreme Court decision null and void. The legislature passed new laws empowering the state to seize and shut down any local school system rather than submit to court-ordered integration. Another law set up state funding for private segregated schools in those localities. The state's most prominent white politicians -- ranging from U.S. Sen. Harry F. Byrd Sr., leader of the ruling Byrd organization, to then-Gov. J. Lindsay Almond and future governor Mills Godwin -- backed these laws, denouncing integration as "a cancer" and "a sickness in the heart." They were egged on by James J. Kilpatrick, a young conservative ideologue who championed defiance in fiery editorials for the Richmond News Leader.
Massive Resistance collapsed in 1959 under assault in state and federal courts. But Prince Edward forged on alone for five more years. The county's 1,550 white students attended a private academy financed in part with state funds, while its 1,800 black students were locked out. The county became a symbol of white intolerance and a national disgrace, until federal courts finally ordered it to reopen its schools in 1964.
But Virginia wasn't the Deep South. In Mississippi, the resistance lasted even longer. An online account of this chapter of the story is available in "The Last Stand of Massive Resistance: Mississippi Public School Integration, 1970" by Charles C. Bolton. This is an excerpt:
Mississippi public schools underwent a dramatic change in 1970. After sixteen years of delays and token desegregation after U.S. Supreme Court orders to dismantle the state's dual school system, a steady stream of legal action by black parents and federal intervention toppled the state's ninety-five-year-old "separate but equal" educational system in which white school children went to one school system and black school children went to another one....
Yet massive white resistance in Mississippi to the United States Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954 continued to thrive in 1970 and decisively undermined the possibility of creating a truly integrated school system....
Private academies
Whites in the Delta and many other black-majority school districts in Mississippi came to see abandonment of the public schools for often hastily organized private segregation academies as the only way to preserve "quality" white education. Mississippi Governor John Bell Williams sympathized, but along with most state politicians and business leaders, recognized that abandoning public schools permanently would damage the state's continuing efforts to attract industry to the state. Between 1966 and 1970, however, the number of private schools in the state rose from 121 to 236, and the number of students attending these schools tripled; most of this growth occurred in black-majority districts. Fewer whites fled from public schools in white-majority districts.
Though whites abandoned public schools in droves in many black-majority districts, they did not relinquish control over these schools. In some locales, the newly enfranchised black population had succeeded in electing a black school board member or two, but even there, whites sometimes thwarted black participation. Most districts, however, had appointed board members, and whites continued to control school systems that neither their children nor those of their white neighbors attended. As a result, they had little incentive to make the improvements to black education already long postponed.
This was not the end of such things, by by means. Indeed, this form of resistance surely helped fuel the ongoing, much broader rightwing attack on public education that the Obama Administration is currently encouraging, while of course pretending otherwise. The use of public funds laundered through private hands has been one of the favorite conservative mechanisms employed on a wide range of fronts over the past 40+ years, and while Rand Paul's language implies that he would have opposed discriminatory practices under this thin veil of pretense, historically libertarians have tended to argue the exact opposite: after all, as they love to say, "It's your money", so you ought to be free to discriminate with it. This leads us directly to our last major topic.
Libertarian "Freedom" vs. Civil Rights Freedom
A subtext running throughout all of the above is that there is a profound difference between the Civil Rights Movement's vision of freedom--a collective escape from an age-old condition of group subjugation, and attainment of full autonomy--and the libertarian vision of freedom based on a thirteen-year-old's desire to be free of his parent's and teacher's rules and regulations (or, in the case of Ayn Rand's objectivism, the freedom of a psychopath to be able to kill as he pleases.) But this diary is already too long enough. So I take up this topic in separate diary, |
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